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[h=2]RACER@25: Issue No. 1, May 1992[/h] Monday, 13 March 2017










As we approach the 25th anniversary of RACER Magazine's debut in April 1992, we will be posting a retrospective series on the 25 most important issues out of the 283 we've published during our first quarter century. We begin with the issue that preceded all those and which very few people saw. It is safe to say it has made everything that followed possible. (Above: The late Michael C. Brown’s photo of Emerson Fittipaldi’s Penske PC-21 Chevy Indy car graced the cover of RACER’s first issue.)
[HR][/HR] After a gestation period that spanned three decades, RACER magazine was finally a go for launch in April 1992 with a May cover date. Founding editor John Zimmermann and founding art director Mark Hancock worked long hours with the support of managing editor Bernadette Phillips and production editor Dyanne Gilliam. RACER's first "editors at large" were Gordon Kirby (whom Paul Pfanner had originally worked with at FORMULA magazine in the early 1970s) and Steve Nickless, who was the founding editor of On Track magazine and later the group publisher at Pfanner Communications during the latter half of the 1980s. Both men were heavily involved in the final five-year in-house development process for RACER and were central to establishing the credibility of the new magazine. Media sales were handled by a young, all-female team led by ad director Donna Chamberlain and her able colleagues Judy Morley, Laura Stoner and Lisa Williams.
A core element of the RACER strategy was to hire and showcase the best and brightest writers, photographers and illustrators to celebrate the beauty, bravery and technical brilliance of racing. In addition to Zimmerman, Kirby and Nickless, the premier issue of RACER contained stories and columns by Pete Lyons, Maurice Hamilton, Eoin Young and technical writer/illustrator Giorgio Piola. RACER attracted an A-list team of shooters led by the late Michael C. Brown, Paul Henri-Cahier, Jeff Bloxham, David Hutson, the late Ron Hussey, Gary Gold, Geoffrey Hewitt, Bob Tronolone, Bob Costanzo, Ron McQueeny and renowned lensman Jeff Zwart, who originally hatched the idea with Pfanner for a new high-quality American racing magazine back in January 1978.
The design of RACER issue No. 1 was overseen directly by Pfanner, who had previously been the art director for both FORMULA and SportsCar magazines. He brought in his friend, ex-McLaren and Arrows graphic designer David Aronson, to create the first RACER logo that was finished just before the magazine went to press.

Founding publisher, Bill Sparks, developed printing specs aimed at creating something very special in contrast to RACER's primary perceived competitors. The magazine was printed in a larger page format with a perfect-bound spine on heavier, brighter paper stock to showcase the lavish use of full-color photography. Production for the premier issue was old school with minimal use of computers, so page layout was completed via typesetting hot-waxed to art boards which then moved through an archaic non-digital pre-press process.
Sparks also created and managed the successful RACER subscription marketing launch campaign that generated a response well beyond expectations.
Barely two weeks before the 1992 Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, a decision was made to host a launch party at a small motorsports art gallery and bookstore in downtown Long Beach. And so it came to pass that RACER magazine debuted to the American racing community on Saturday evening, April 11, 1992. Al Unser Jr. and his uncle Bobby pulled back a black shroud to reveal the new magazine to the assembled VIPs, including Emerson Fittipaldi, who graced the cover of the premier issue following his recent win at Surfers Paradise. Following remarks by the founders, Pfanner's friend and National Speed Sport News editor/publisher Chris Economaki raised a glass for a champagne toast to the success of RACER and the team that created it, stating "there is room in racing for both of us."

The content of RACER's first issue created buzz and with it, some real controversy. Maurice Hamilton's blunt assessment of Williams F1 star Nigel Mansell's mercurial temperament in a feature story titled "The Enemy Within" raised eyebrows with its honesty and accuracy. In 1992, the Indy 500 and IndyCar racing between Chevy and Ford (pictured) were the kings of American motorsport and Gordon Kirby's "Indy Engine War" cover feature on the intensifying battle hinted at looming challenges for the health of the series overall. Kirby's opinion column, titled "Looking Forward, Looking Back," tackled the thorny issue of American racing's habitual failure to manage technology, costs and audience momentum.
Kirby also examined the growing stature and marketing power of NASCAR in "The Greatest Show on Earth." Respected journalist Pete Lyons assessed the flagging fortunes of the IMSA Camel GT Series that was facing the imminent departure of manufactures and teams as a result of spiraling costs in a story titled "Sports Car Racing's Twilight Zone."
Once the afterglow of RACER's launch passed, the team was confronted with the harsh realities of publishing the magazine with woefully insufficient capital. Thankfully, Zwart quickly stepped forward with the needed investment and his valuable hands-on assistance, making good on a promise made to Pfanner on the fateful day in 1978 when they first discussed the idea of someday creating a premium racing magazine for America. The next 12 months were fraught with many challenges, but RACER was now very real, and it was soon growing fast both in scale and influence.
Please enjoy this PDF version of RACER No. 1, May 1992.

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Prototype issue number 0:
RACER@25: Issue No. 0, Jan. 1992 – The prototype

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RACER@25: Issue No. 51, July 1996 - Day of Reckoning

Friday, 24 March 2017



By Andrew Crask

This is the seventh installment in RACER’s ongoing 25th anniversary celebration during which we share the 25 most important issues from our first quarter century.

[HR][/HR] Related Stories RACER@25: Issue No. 49, May 1996 - Dueling 500s


RACER@25: Issue No. 30, October 1994 - The First Brickyard 400


RACER@25: Issue No. 0, Jan. 1992 – The prototype


RACER@25: Issue No. 1, May 1992


RACER@25: Issue No. 13, May 1993

American racing's most publicized – if perhaps not its most eagerly awaited – month of May in memory delivered headline-grabbing smack-talk, tragedy and even a little unintended comedy. But even before the competing spectacles of the Indy Racing League's first Indianapolis 500 and CART's U.S. 500 at Michigan International Speedway had played out, many minds had been made up – and the consensus view would benefit no one on the open-wheel side of the U.S. racing landscape.
CART's drivers and teams, considering themselves locked out of Indy by the IRL's rules, made much of the fact that the new league's field lacked top level experience and so represented a safety risk. This theme was underscored by CART's claim that "the real cars and stars" would be at its race rather than the more familiar one in Indiana. IRL entrants were no less contemptuous of their rivals. It all made for a toxic promotional brew that surely turned off casual fans even as it galvanized the partisans.
The grim mood got darker when Indy pole winner Scott Brayton was killed in a freak accident during practice, but the race itself provided a welcome respite from mourning and ill will. Buddy Lazier battled through the field to win, overcoming a back-breaking crash at Phoenix just a month earlier to emerge as a exactly the sort of all-American hero the new league had been seeking. But would that be enough to overcome the downside of a fractured fan base?
Meanwhile in Michigan, those turned off by what they saw as CART's arrogant presumptions of superiority were bemused by the multi-car wreck before the start of the U.S. 500, but when the delayed race finally got underway, it too delivered a sensational spectacle of speed before also crowning an American winner in Jimmy Vasser. His cheeky "Who needs milk?" one-liner in victory lane charged up the true believers on both sides in opposite ways, but proved ironic: They all did, as the declining TV ratings for both races compared to the previous year's Indy 500 – and their continuing slide in the years to come – were to demonstrate.
And NASCAR just kept doing its own thing – which, as Gerald Martin related in his portion of our three-part cover story, was not merely maintaining its momentum but expanding it by leaps and bounds. With IndyCar bleeding from self-inflicted wounds and Formula 1 continuing its self-imposed isolation from U.S. shores, stock car racing was riding a wave to unprecedented domination of American racing business, as Bill King explored in a prescient feature story, "Popularity Contest."
RACER's F1 focus that month would also be familiar theme, albeit in different circumstances, for today's readers as Maurice Hamilton examined the struggles of McLaren to shed a period of inexplicable mediocrity. History would prove that the efforts underway would indeed return the team to world championship form, something the harried McLaren of 2017 might take heart from.
During the first half of 1996 RACER's in-house creative services agency, Pfanner Communications, was busy and growing. One project in particular captured a lot of attention. It was a TV spot created in collaboration with our clients, the No Fear action sports apparel company. With the growing tensions of the dueling 500s as a backdrop, the spot was intended to run in the first commercial break in the 1996 Indy 500 and it was conceived by RACER founder Paul Pfanner and directed by RACER co-founder Jeff Zwart. The idea was refined by No Fear’s marketing director Jim Hancock and the script written by No Fear’s creative director Rick Bolton.
The spot’s message was that the soul and identity of Indy car racing was defined by the best athletes who were competing rather than the track owners, team owners, sponsors, manufacturers or toxic politics of the day. After passionate input from a leading team owner in the CART series, No Fear’s marketing team made the decision to instead run the TV spot in the first commercial break in CART’s U.S. 500 – which ironically happened to fall just after the so-called “Cars and Stars” of the series were involved in a chaotic pace lap accident that red-flagged the race before it began.
Needless to say, the No Fear TV spot’s message was lost in the context of what had just happened and it could be argued the war for perceived superiority was also lost by CART in that fateful moment.

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[h=2]RACER@25: Issue No. 108, April 2001[/h] Wednesday, 05 April 2017







This is the 12th installment in RACER's ongoing 25th anniversary celebration during which we share the 25 most important issues from our first quarter century.
[HR][/HR] [h=3]Related Stories[/h] RACER@25: Issue No. 100, August 2000 - Jeff Gordon, Golden Boy


RACER@25: Issue No. 104, December 2000 - Return of the USGP


RACER@25: Issue No. 80, December 1998


RACER@25: Issue No. 77, September 1998 - The Man who Saved Ferrari


RACER@25: Issue No. 51, July 1996 - Day of Reckoning








Racing's thrills come with a price – the fact that the sport we love can take our lives or those whose talents and personalities we have come to respect, cherish, even adore. Being forced to confront this fact has happily become a rarity in the modern era. But that just makes the shock more profound when it does happen.
RACER was in the closing stages of production on our 108th issue, three weeks into the magazine's new era under new majority owners Haymarket Media, when Dale Earnhardt – icon of a whole era of NASCAR stock car racing and a seemingly larger-than-life figure – was lost in a three-car crash on the final lap of the Daytona 500. As had been the case seven years earlier following the death of Ayrton Senna, the staff – now with Haymarket's editor Andy Hallbery and designer Allan Muir working alongside editor John Zimmermann – set to work to recast the issue into an appropriately informative and respectful tribute to a lost hero. The result of these efforts was a complete sellout of the issue on newsstands.
Another aspect to the tragedy was provided in our spotlight on Earnhardt's debut with Corvette Racing in the Rolex 24 at Daytona that preceded that grim Daytona 500. As we later learned, sports car endurance racing was an avenue the veteran had planned to explore further along with his son as his NASCAR career wound down. Hindsight made it a poignant tale of what might have been.
Welcome counterpoint to the grief and loss was provided by Maurice Hamilton's look at a brash new talent on everyone's lips in Formula 1. Jenson Button had made everyone take notice with his precocious rise to F1 at the age of 20 with Williams in 2000, where he put in a series of starring performances...and then surprised everyone even more by leaving the team for Benetton in 2001. Hamilton provided American audiences with insight into the mindset of the man who would grow into one of F1's most enduring and popular characters in the years ahead.
Speaking of popular, Alex Zanardi had become one of American racing's most celebrated talents through his epic performances and engaging personality while driving for Chip Ganassi Racing's CART IndyCar team in the 1990s. The Italian's fan following was all the more remarkable for the fact that he had displaced home-grown favorite Jimmy Vasser as the de facto team leader with his back-to-back CART titles. That surely was due to a significant degree to the friendly rivalry the two maintained during their stint as teammates, lasting friendship following Zanardi's subsequent move to F1 for 1999.
David Phillips explored the pair's relationship, remarkable in the modern world of pro racing, with his feature story for that issue, which came as Montoya was testing the waters for a return to CART following his frustrating season in F1. That return would ultimately have devastating consequences for Zanardi with the crash at the Lausitzring in 2001 that claimed both his legs but, unbelievably, the force of Zanardi's will to overcome and to see the positive side of whatever life throws at him, would open the door to another inspiring chapter of his life that would continue to play a recurrent role in RACER.
In addition to the farewell it provided to an American icon, issue No. 108 also was the last for the RACER format that had been maintained with minor changes for the first decade of the magazine. The May issue would bring a full relaunch under the direction of Haymarket Media in collaboration with the founding management group under Paul Pfanner, and would take RACER in a bold new direction.

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In RACER Magazine: Less is More

Tuesday, 04 April 2017


By Gary Watkins / Images by Toyota Gazoo Racing/James Moy Photography, LAT, Harald Dawo
Will a reduction in downforce play into Toyota’s hands as it seeks to get on LMP1 parity with Porsche?
Toyota took the FIA World Endurance Championship LMP1 class fight down to the wire last year, but in reality it wasn’t a serious contender for the title. That’s not a contradiction, because the Japanese marque’s TS050 HYBRID wasn’t really a competitive proposition on all tracks.
But the good news is that there are multiple reasons why it could and should close the gap on reigning champions Porsche over a 2017 WEC season in which just two factory teams will battle it out in LMP1, following Audi’s withdrawal.
The all-new 2016 Toyota was truly competitive just three times over the course of last season and won just once, on home ground at Fuji in October, after unforeseen technical failures robbed it at Spa in May and, in dramatic fashion, at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. It isn’t quite as simple as saying that the TS050 was only in the hunt at tracks requiring lower levels of downforce. It is, however, correct to say that it lacked the downforce to be truly competitive at places such as Silverstone, the Nurburgring and Austin’s Circuit of The Americas, and even when push came to shove at the championship showdown in Bahrain.

Rule changes for 2017 should play in Toyota’s favor. The LMP1 regulation freeze announced last November hasn’t affected the revisions always scheduled to come into force this season, most notably changes to front and rear aerodynamics conceived to deprive the cars of up to 30 percent of their downforce. The lower downforce TS050 HYBRID effectively has less to lose than the Porsche.
Without the financial resources of its rivals, Toyota has always focussed development on its Le Mans aero. Or as Toyota Motorsport GmbH technical director Pascal Vasselon explains, has to “use most of the elements of the Le Mans package for the high-downforce kit.”

That strategy hurt it harder last year than in previous seasons. The “10 megajoule” reduction in energy allowed each lap – which equated to roughly eight percent less fuel – put the onus on drag reduction for Le Mans.
“All the development we were doing for Le Mans was really hurting the high-downforce version of the car,” explains Vasselon. “As we are not able to put a lot resources into a high-downforce package, we had to live with a baseline car that was conceived to shed drag.”
The changes in the rules – an increase in the rake for the front splitter and a 50mm (2in.) decrease in the height of the rear diffuser – should bring the two specifications of car closer together.
“The new regulations, I would say, better suit our resource limitations,” continues Vasselon. “You’ll have more things in common between the two specs of car.”
The revised aero rules, conceived to peg back lap times at Le Mans, have come in at a time when there has been a further limitation on the hours each manufacturer can spend in the wind-tunnel. A limit of 1,200 hours per calendar year in 2016 is down to 800 this year. There are, however, no restrictions on the amount of CFD (computational fluid dynamics) development as there are in Formula 1.

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[h=2]RACER@25: Issue No. 100, August 2000 - Jeff Gordon, Golden Boy[/h] By Andrew Crask

This is the 11th installment in RACER's ongoing 25th anniversary celebration during which we share the 25 most important issues from our first quarter century.

[HR][/HR] [h=3]Related Stories[/h] RACER@25: Issue No. 108, April 2001


RACER@25: Issue No. 104, December 2000 - Return of the USGP


RACER@25: Issue No. 80, December 1998


RACER@25: Issue No. 77, September 1998 - The Man who Saved Ferrari


RACER@25: Issue No. 51, July 1996 - Day of Reckoning








Century marks don't come around very often – particularly in the cutthroat publishing world. So it was with a special sense of pride and accomplishment that we put together the 100th issue of RACER, some eight years after the magazine first went from dream to reality.
A lot had happened in the motorsports world in that time – both good and bad – and the magazine had had to deal with its own share of heartache too, including the sad passing of our founding NASCAR writer, Gerald Martin, in 1999. But after the pain of being parted from an old friend, we made a new one in Ben Blake – a longtime NASCAR beat writer who quickly earned a place among RACER's most popular scribes. As did veteran IndyCar writer David Phillips and automotive engineer Peter Brock, who had also joined RACER's growing list of contributors.
RACER's 100th issue came while some significant milestones were happening in the racing world. Chip Ganassi Racing had bridged the CART/IRL divide by returning to the Indy 500 with CART regulars Juan Pablo Montoya and Jimmy Vasser. Montoya proceeded to sweep all before him, scoring a dominant win as an Indy rookie. While this development provided fresh ammunition for partisans on both sides to shoot back and forth, it also sparked renewed hope that the self-destructive split of IndyCar racing could be resolved. Editor John Zimmermann explored the prospects in his perspective article on the race for this month's issue.
In a remarkable bit of symmetry, our 100th issue coincided with the 100th IndyCar race victory for Team Penske, scored by Gil de Ferran at the CART race in Nazareth, Pa. Penske would go on to follow Ganassi's path to Indy – and emulate its feat there – the following year, although final resolution of The Split would take the better part of another decade.
But, momentous as these things were, the honor of cover story for our 100th issue went – as it has more often than any other personality to date – to NASCAR star Jeff Gordon. Although not then enjoying the greatest season of his spectacular career – he would win "only" three Winston Cup races – "Wonder Boy," as Dale Earnhardt had nicknamed him, had evolved beyond precocious talent into an all-around team leader at Hendrick Motorsports and, as the most dominant American motorsports presence to have emerged during RACER's first 100 issues, we thought it appropriate to make him our cover man for this one. Ben Blake's portrayal of Gordon's growth into "Wonder Man" would prove perceptive, as Gordon would regain championship glory for a fourth time in 2001.
During the summer of 2000 RACER founder Paul Pfanner continued the dialogue with the leadership team at UK-based Haymarket Media and after numerous false starts, the fundamentals of a deal began to come together to combine the companies following face-to-face meetings between the key players in London. At the same time, RACER's contract publishing business was about to expand after reaching agreement with the owners of Vintage Motorsport Magazine to publish the magazine in 2001.

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25 years of Racer Magazine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iORVPymjU10

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Issue lucky 13 1993

[h=2]RACER@25: Issue No. 13, May 1993[/h] Wednesday, 15 March 2017



By RACER staff










It has been said that one of the most important milestones in any new business is surviving the first year. Such was the case for RACER in 1993 as the first anniversary was celebrated on the Saturday evening of the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach in the same racing art gallery that hosted this new American racing magazine's debut one year before.
The May 1993 issue of RACER captured the excitement of reigning F1 world champion Nigel Mansell's stunning arrival in the CART PPG IndyCar World Series at Surfers Paradise. It could be argued that this issue also memorialized a unique moment in time when IndyCar racing was at its zenith in terms of global stature and appeal.
RACER magazine was growing and it was apparent in the page count which swelled from 76 to 104 pages over the previous year. Advertising was up 33% over the premier issue and RACER's audited circulation had grown a staggering 151%. RACER's roster of respected contributing editors was also expanding with the addition of the late Gerald Martin on the NASCAR beat, Jon Asher covering NHRA and Bill Lovell providing insight into the American road racing scene
Issue No. 13 offered a compelling snapshot of an amazing period in global motorsport. The magazine's opening spread image highlighted the first race of Michael Andretti's star-crossed transition to Formula 1 and set the stage for something special for RACER's readers.

Pete Lyons delivered an insightful overview titled "The State of The Sport" ...

... and Gordon Kirby's expansive Indianapolis 500 preview "War of the Worlds" conveyed the remarkable energy surrounding the upcoming 77th running of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.

Editor John Zimmermann's interview with Dan Gurney about the Eagle Toyotas crushing the GTP category in IMSA Camel GT underscored growing concerns for America's premier sports car series. Kirby's feature "Inside Penske" took RACER readers behind the closed doors or the team's Poole, England-based racing car factory where The Captain's cars were built. Martin's "On the Edge of Glory" exposed the driven personality of Mark Martin, perhaps one of the greatest drivers to never win what was then known as the Winston Cup. Technical writer and illustrator Giorgio Piola's considerable talents were on display in a story about tailoring F1 cockpits to the likes of Jean Alesi, Gerhard Berger, Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna. Famed photographer Bob Tronolone's photo feature on the most innovative cars to ever race in the Indy 500 is now even more fascinating in the context of today's spec-based Verizon IndyCar Series.

By early 1993, RACER had found the ultimate marketing partner in ESPN thanks to the sterling efforts of young ad director Donna Chamberlain (Pfanner) and the welcome advocacy of RACER to ESPN's management by the late Benny Parsons, who served as ESPN's NASCAR analyst.
Founders Paul Pfanner and Jeff Zwart collaborated in creating RACER's first TV spot that would run during ESPN's IndyCar, F1, IMSA and NASCAR broadcasts. This spot would not have been possible without the critical assistance of Frank Brooks, Richard Smith and Austin Craig at J. Walter Thompson in Detroit, the agency of record for Ford and Goodyear. The three men provided valuable advice before RACER's launch and then worked with their supportive clients at Ford to allow RACER to use the company's current B-roll footage in the RACER subscription TV spot.
(Enjoy! But note the phone number in the spot is no longer active!)




After only a year it was clear that RACER was living up to the original vision of founders Pfanner and Zwart 15 years earlier when the duo originally discussed the concept. RACER was now truly embraced by American racing fans and the American racing industry but ominous political storm clouds were beginning to gather on the horizon that signaled disruptive events that would soon shape the destiny of the sport and RACER.

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1993 Video commercial for Racer Magazine

RACER@25 - RACER@25: Issue No. 13, May 1993